Posted
by
timothy
on Monday August 22, 2011 @05:49PM
from the paper-and-whistle-makers-too-I-hope dept.

conner_bw writes "Twitter has confirmed that it will meet with the UK Home Secretary on Thursday, after being called in for discussions over the role it played in the recent UK riots. Twitter will send a representative to the meeting scheduled for August 25. Both Facebook and RIM will also send representatives to the meeting in regards to their effects on the riots."

Will there be representatives from the telephone company, and the postal services, to answer for the roles they played in the riots? What about mainstream print, radio, and television media who made others aware of the riots, and carried the idea of unrest to others, who then joined in?

I heard most of those rioters had feet. Maybe we should look into those parents who have been plotting for years to enable the riots, by raising those ambulatory children... teaching them to stand erect, to walk, even to run and evade capture.

And when did it become OK to shift responsibility and blame to anywhere and everywhere except the people who actually committed the crimes?

When a small group of banksters committed fraud to crash the world economy, ruining lives and pushing hundreds of millions of people into poverty or economic uncertainty.

Don't fool yourself. The biggest crimes are the ones where it's " OK to shift responsibility and blame to anywhere and everywhere except the people who actually committed the crimes". And the same people who paid for those crimes are going to pay for the crimes that occur when social contracts break down and civil violence occurs: everyone but the ones responsible.

There are two reasons most bankers got away with wrecking the economy.

Firstly we encouraged them to do it. In the 1980s Thatcher wanted the UK to become the world's first post-industrial economy. Everyone should own a house and a car, funded by loans. Everyone should be able to own shares in private companies, and the state should do as little as possible itself so that private enterprise can move in and take over those services for profit. We kept voting for those policies* that were building up banks and

* Okay, I didn't, I was too young to vote, and some people voted Labour.

Actually, by the end Labour were the same as the Tories at sucking up to big business. Possibly worse, in fact, as at least some Tories have some experience in business and would have known when they were being fed bullshit.

Speaking with a cab driver here in London this morning, he claimed there have been 1,900 arrests in London over the riots. 1,900 would seem a remarkably high number, and I challenged him on it. He said it was information he gathered from some sort of official who was a fare the previous day.

If they did arrest this number of people, it's remarkable and I would strongly suspect collusion from social media outlets as part of the roundup effort. GPS on your phone, anyone?

It sounds close to the official number as quick glance at BBC news's website shows. [bbc.co.uk] Nothing to do with collusion, people keep talking about all of the CCTV camera's in the UK police have been identifying people through that. Most of the papers have also been printing pictures of rioters in an effort to identify them, there are about half a dozen stories of mothers turning in their kids when they saw the child's photo in a national paper.

This meeting is the higher ups way of looking like they are doing something to daily mail readers, I'm hoping nothing comes of it especially when you realise Twitter & Facebook were used by people to organise clean-ups and identify the rioters.

There has also been a lot of talk about the harshness of the punishments handed down to rioters. The UK doesn't require mobile phones to have Government available GPS tracking like the USA. You can only check-in with Facebook/Google latitude and not twitter.

There are cameras everywhere, they just have to follow the masked guys from camera to camera on their way to and from the crime until they remove or have not yet put on their masks.Takes some time but you get there.

I love how the gov'ts love to go blah blah blah blah instead of helping to fix the causes that caused people to want to riot in the first place. Plenty of $$$$$$ to flap gums but not actualy fix things

And if you shut Twitter down, or started tracking its users, how many minutes would it take for people to find an alternative? Haven't they attempted to unopen Pandora's Box before with music, Kazza, etc? How did that work for them? More money being wasted by clueless suits in government.

It's long been suspected that "ECHLON" already monitors phone calls, faxes, and emails. But hey, maybe all their gear is just a huge expensive decoration, to distract tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy freaks. The truth is somewhere in the middle.:)

RIM's SMS most likely don't leave their network. Why would they? If I recall correctly, they are encrypted at the phone, so they wouldn't be easy to intercept at the tower.

Don't worry. This is just politicians doing what they do best: Attacking the consequences instead of the causes. Solves nothing, but makes them look tough, and allows for some more anti-freedom legislation. A few more riots and the UK will have the privacy laws of Saudi Arabia or Iran, which is what the Government wants in the first place.

Any social problems in that area - like high unemployment, low standard of living, educational/career dead-end. other types of violence/repression, possibly from government agencies?

In some of the areas where there were riots and looting. Not in others. And the rioters seem to come from across the social spectrum (the teenage daughter of a millionaire has been arrested, although she has pleaded not guilty). The rioters, and their reasons for rioting, were so diverse that every pundit can find cases to support their political or social agenda, and the opponents of every pundit can find cases that disprove it. If anybody (eg, David Cameron) says that the causes were simple then they are

In some of the areas where there were riots and looting. Not in others. And the rioters seem to come from across the social spectrum (the teenage daughter of a millionaire has been arrested, although she has pleaded not guilty)..

Is that champagne looting rather than socialism then, wrt millionaire daughters

Frankly, the observation that the media tend to only care about spectacle, and focus in on the spectacle even when it isn't the center of an issue, seems pretty self evident.

The media seems to do a pretty good job covering large protests, even when peaceful. I don't mean follow the letter of the law and get permits and meet in designated areas. I mean a peaceful version of the riots. Gandhi and Martin Luther King and the Arab Spring have shown what peaceful protest can bring. Burning and looting your own neighborhood will get you nowhere. If you are going to go the violent route, you'd better be prepared to see it out and win (Libya) or you'll be worse off as the loser.

It's the same weird collection of unrelated causes every time they meet for G7, G20 or World Bank summits. The protests got a lot of press the first dozen times, but failed to grab much popular support. If the ghettos of London rose up in peaceful protest, that would certainly get the attention of the media.

Where is globlisaisation man I don know like nobody come from dere like is it in affric or somefink no way I's goink on no march walk thing man if I ain't got no wheels and I mean some smart wheels then

One person protesting there was interviewed and stated that news media would not care unless fuss would be created.

Right, because they tried peacefully protesting first, and that didn't work.</sarcasm>

Actually, they did - the full interview had the youth pointing out that 20,000 people protested peacefully outside Scotland Yard a few months ago. Media and government completely ignored them. The youth said words to the effect of "you're paying attention to us now, aren't you?".

One person said they were "gettin their taxes back" as they ran off with a flat screen TV. The reporter asked what does that even mean? They had no response. Let's not forget these lovelies http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424

But aren't you using a few individuals (individuals that a newspaper editor chose to portray on TV/paper/site) to paint a picture of the whole group? A pretty small sample size. And likely a biased one at that, no? Are we going to kid ourselves into believing that newspapers operate independently of the interests of those in power?

Besides, I'd like to see the well crafted harangue you could come up with when someone sticks a mic in your face out of nowhere. You don't know that that person didn't have so

The problem is that whilst poverty and unemployment might well have been a cause, they were not an excuse.

The North of England has long seen much higher levels of poverty and unemployment yet these riots didn't get much further north than Birmingham bar Manchester. Yorkshire was fair quiet, as were the likes of Newcastle and Scotland- places generally known for having rather prominent chavish underclass yet for some reason- even when all their police had been sent down to London meaning it would be even eas

It is all about relative prosperity. You will be miserable if you make $10,000/y in the US while your neighbors make $100,000/y. Whereas if you lived in poor village in India you would be quite happy even with $5000/y.

The social issues in the UK are as much real as in India or elsewhere. Don't be mislead by absolute comparison between countries. The high unemployment and slums are very real and if nothing is done about this, it will turn very ugly.

Yes and no. "Relative prosperity" is another way of saying "standard of living". There was an article a few years back talking about millionaires who were working themselves to death, because their neighborhood was full of whatever you call 10x- and 100x-millionaires. By the neighborhood standard, these millionaires were "poor". (IIRC, many moved away to areas where they didn't feel the need to try and keep up with the Hiltons).

It's the same logic that sends Americans to poorer countries for vacations - whe

aye, while I agree there is little defense for what the rioters do, there is something important about them having the technology to have either option. You can't ban talking to each-other, or even saying specific things (even if it is down with big brother). The right to say things the government dosn't want you to say should be fought for, regardless of the consequences, and banning twitter etc... just gives the rioters/looters something to justify their actions with.

With the speed with the government can clamp down on the citizenry with it's resources, it's only fair that the population have access to the same level of coordination. I think we would all agree that all societies have the right of self-determination, and if self-determination takes the form of open rebellion and revolution, that's the price we pay for democracy.

These days, freedom to communicate via the internet and text messaging is almost as important as the right to assemble, and definitely as vital. The powers that be are using their authority in order to force it's agenda on the citizenry. Whether they agree or not, if the citizenry decides to rise up against them and defy their authority, is immaterial. Government exists at the will of the people, not the other way around.

There's a fine line between staging a revolution and looting an electronics store, my friend.

But not that much. Most political political discontent (beyond a few radicals like Noam Chomsky) is really just about pain in the pocketbook. (Perhaps you've hard of the Boston Tea Party, or have even noticed that "it's the economy, stupid" in US presidential politics lately.) When people's quality of life goes down, they get angry. When enough people can no longer afford food, it's game over. That's what ha

The only thing "radical" about Noam Chomsky is that he speaks the truth to power, backed up with plenty of verifiable real world references (which make the often repeated 'He is no more than a conspiracy theorist' little more than a sound bite for the seriously-uninformed to repeat). When presidential candidates dare do the same [salon.com], they are disappeared off the media circus.

Well, I didn't call him a conspiracy theorist, did I? I don't follow him all that closely, and I would be surprised if he hasn't said some indefensible things occasionally over the years, but it's evident he's not motivated by narrow self-interest. I was kind of disgusted watching how little voters cared about what we did to Iraq, vs how we exploded when our finances took a dump.

The UK riots were ONLY looting. Do you think more than about 10 people cared about the police shooting some armed dealer? really?

No they weren't. In some places if was just trashing stuff, with no looting. In others, one gang would come along and smash all of the windows, and a while later others would come along and loot. In some places and in some groups there was clear protest going on, in others the riots seem to have been just for the hell of it. Even those who were not bothered by the police killing of a suspected criminal were bothered that they misled the public about what had happened (forensics showed that the shot the poli

The truth didn't come from the police. It came from IPCC which is the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The police initially said that Mark Duggan exchanged gun-fire. Actually they found Mark Duggan's gun hidden in his sock.

It is hard to say if it was the police miscommunication or an attempt to cover their mistakes but the incident was badly managed.

Dangerous low-life criminals who are just as likely, if not more likely, to put one of their bullets in an innocent bystander who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a gang feud turns sour.

As opposed to the police, who managed to shoot one of their own?

Cops are supposed to be the good guys, and they're supposed to be better trained than this.

In this specific case of Mark Duggan, although on the occasion he was shot and killed he may not have been the one to fire first

According to the new version of events, he hadn't drawn a weapon (it was tucked in his sock). So, while we can debate whether being a "scumbag" is a capital offense, we can't ignore some basic facts - the police shot and killed an unarmed man, and managed to shoot one of their own in the process.

I'm disappointing you aren't willing to put your name against that comment Mr AC. Because IMO you're at least partially right. The kids can try and play the society game that we have laid out to them, or they can make their own rules and fight to have them apply instead. we like our rules so we apply them with force and fight back, but that doesn't make our society rules "right" any more then they are "wrong". there are winners and losers in any social contract, when the losers are sick of losing they stop playing by the rules, and the winners get angry because "but, we said that wasn't ok to do!". but pretending there is some "rules" to life that "everyone should follow" and those that don't are "evil scum" is ignorant to the complexity of even a basic animal let alone one as complicated as the exceptionally resourceful, extremely opportunistic naked ape.

if you've never had to rely on government handouts to eat, you're not in a position to condemn the actions of the less fortunate, its completely disheartening to have your survival reliant on a faceless entity who is willing and able to throw you to the dogs at a moments notice.

the riots may have occurred because people are selfish, but you can't stop people from being selfish, IMO social policy is what is wrong and what caused this issue. people are just people doing what they do to give them selves an advantage at life.

you're expected to pay into this society to help make things "better for everyone", and yet when you need help, then what? Imo this won't be the last high profile riot in western cultural hubs until the government gets a lot more social in their spending to offset the hardships that the financial crisis induces on the population.

Lots of people in the UK know what you're talking about when you say a flick knife. It's a colloquial expression. Maybe its not used correctly (if you're in Ye Olde Guilde of Knifey Makers or something like that) but people here would understand it to be a sharp easily concealed knife that folds into the handle and springs and locks into place, or perhaps is flicked into the locked position by a flick of the wrists. We've got quite a lot of pedants here already in the UK so probably we should be grat

I used to do counter-terrorism ops, and right now high-end automobiles are being burnt in record numbers in Germany.

That's a bizarre non-sequitur in the middle of a sentence!

either create jobs for youth and stop subsidizing the rich, or watch your country burn.

England has socialism up to its eyebrows. They've created a nearly-unemployable class of young people by removing any need to work (for the basics). The jobs are there, yet most low-skilled jobs are filled by immigrants (I was in London recently, and it seemed everyone in a service role had a French accent; it was very strange). Jobs programs have been tried, and people would simply not show up, or be so lacking in basic literacy, numeracy, or wor

I know it's terribly unpopular to be the voice of reason in a "GOVERNMENT IS BAD" discussion, but this meeting may not be a bad thing. Perhaps the government just wants insight into how they can get advance notice of violent trends. Perhaps Twitter can provide easy access to its data, to find people bragging about the loot they took. Perhaps whatever socioeconomic factors (if any) that led to the riots could be derived from other posts by the rioters, and the government could better understand the problems it faces.

not necessarily, in a proper functioning democracy, the electorate would kick the gov's ass if they tried blocking twitter cos' they allowed the riots, etc.

Thus why they are working on making it impossible for the citizenry to communicate quickly enough to outmaneuver the government who will most definitely still have their radios while the electorate is stuck with useless cell phones and internet connections with no idea which direction the troops are rolling in from.

a freaking [congressional] revolution... could change government views

I am not sure why you think the government would be opposing itself. What would be the motivation of Congress to revolt? Most of the views of the government on the effects of internet communication platforms are formed within the Congress (and the legislative branch elsewhere). Sometimes the executive government nudges the legislative, sometimes it is the other way around, but overall the two branches are pretty much sharing the same views.

Does anybody else perceive this as a kill-switch ploy between that of corporate and government?

More likely it is the government asking for a way to monitor tweets in real time surreptitiously based on various geo filters. e.g. all tweets from particular IPs / cells coming from a particular region. I wouldn't be surprised if they also wanted the ability for tweets to be modified, delayed, lost etc. and to send out tweets to people based on geographic location too.